Democracy gone Astray: Wednesday, August 01, 2018

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, August 01, 2018

Nigel Farage's Gong Conspiracy Torn Apart By These Brexiteer MPs' Knighthoods

Three Brexiteer MPs have been knighted in the New Year’s honours list, despite Nigel Farage’s claim his support for Brexit is why he has received nothing.

Graham Brady, Christopher Chope and Geoffrey Clifton-Brown were among the five MPs knighted in the list, unveiled on Friday evening.

I can think of only two times it’s happened to me: I read a news story, or even a series of stories, and thought that it contained such extreme exaggerations that it had to be, essentially, false. I could enumerate my reasons, which were similar both times: the stories came from the Russian media, which is unreliable (even in the independent media outlets, reporting standards are often lax); the stories described awful, nearly unthinkable violence that came so neatly, so horrifyingly packaged, that it defied belief. I have known violence to be insidious, messy, trivialized by all participants, even as it happens, and these stories seemed to paint the exact opposite picture. These stories were preposterous—the word Hannah Arendt used in explaining why the world was so slow to understand the murderous threats posed by Hitler and Stalin.

Russia has denied claims that UN sanctions against North Korea have been breached by Russian tankers transferring fuel to the regime’s tankers at sea.

The statement from the foreign ministry said Russia has “fully and strictly observed the sanctions regime”. It came in response to a Reuters report citing two separate, unidentified western European security sources who said ship-to-ship transfers took place in October and November and represented a breach of sanctions.

Last autumn, we watched as Bashar al-Assad pummeled the life out of east Aleppo. His barrel bombs collapsed stone apartment buildings into concrete slabs, crushing their inhabitants between the layers. Those who survived were left with hunger, disease, and despair. Death surrounded them. With devastating detail, the siege taught us the full meaning of “kneel or starve,” the Syrian president’s strategy for defeating “the terrorists”—basically, anyone who opposed him. In mid-December, the Assad regime’s menacing green busses forcefully evacuated tens of thousands of civilians to Idlib, where local humanitarians scrambled to erect enough plastic tents for the families as snow began to fall.

Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) cautioned the world to keep a close on Russia as their activity in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean are the highest he’s seen since the Cold War.

According to an interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Stoltenberg has seen 13 additional subs since 2014, Politico cited.

Jagmeet Singh hovered between tables, switching seamlessly between languages as he obliged photo requests. For a young mother from Ethiopia, the Canadian politician had a greeting in Amharic. To her friend from Eritrea, he offered a few lines of Tigrinya, plucked from a linguistic arsenal that Singh estimates includes a word or phrases from about 45 tongues.

It’s a handy skill for a politician based in Toronto, one of the world’s most multicultural cities. But for the 38-year-old – who recently became the first person of colour to lead a major political party in Canada – it’s also a nod to how he’s seeking to define himself in a global climate marked by Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump.

The next few days will tell a lot about the conscience, courage, and political calculus of congressional Democrats. With a Friday deadline looming for passage of a budget to keep the government open, this is the moment of peak leverage for the minority party. How that leverage is used—or squandered—will speak volumes about which issues and groups are seen as most important—and which can be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power, a book about Barack Obama’s presidency and the tenacity of white supremacy, has captured the attention of many of us. One crucial question is why now in this moment has his apolitical pessimism gained such wide acceptance?

Coates and I come from a great tradition of the black freedom struggle. He represents the neoliberal wing that sounds militant about white supremacy but renders black fightback invisible. This wing reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people.

For the past six years, ‘Syria’ had come to refer to war and the refugee crisis. News about Syria rushed onto the front pages. The devastation of the country seized the imagination of people across the world. What was this war about? How could a country - seemingly stable - fall so quickly into the vortex of chaos? What about the millions of Syrians who were so hastily removed from their homes, hiding with family members inside Syria or rushing outside to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey?

All that is now changed. There is so little concern with the war in Syria, with the peace negotiations and with the refugee crisis. Few news outlets regularly carry news of the ongoing crisis. There is some interest in the callous ‘Muslim Ban’ of the Trump administration. There has been an 83% drop in refugee admissions into the United States, with Syrian refugees virtually banned from entry into the country. Of the migrants that Trump’s administration has allowed in since October, 60% are Christian. This ‘Muslim Ban’ remains in the news, but not the specific problem of the Syrians who have fled their country.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference, a regular meeting of the foreign ministers of 57 Muslim-majority countries, held an extraordinary session in Istanbul on Wednesday, in which they rejected US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. In a communique they called Trump’s decision “unilateral,” “illegal,” and “irresponsible” and said it was “null and void.”

After nearly four months of what started out as a crackdown against the Muslim minority Rohingya by the government of Myanmar, we now have our first rough estimates for how many lives have been lost: At least 9,000 Rohingya have been killed since August 25.

According to a Doctors Without Borders survey released on Thursday, about 6,700 of those deaths occurred in the first two months of the campaign that has been called everything from ethnic cleansing to apartheid to genocide.

A 16-year-old Palestinian boy, shown in a photo that has been roundly condemned as symbolising the Israeli army's use of excessive force, has been charged with throwing stones at a group of armed Israeli soldiers.

An image of Fawzi al-Junaidi, blindfolded and surrounded by more than 20 Israeli occupation forces, was widely denounced as it was shared on social media earlier this week.

Vladimir Putin has declared mission accomplished for Russian forces in the fight against Islamic State in Syria, as he made a surprise visit to the Russian airbase in the country.

“Friends, the motherland is waiting for you,” Putin told the Russian air force detachment based at the Khmeimim airbase during his visit on Monday morning. “You are coming back home with victory.”

The EU's foreign policy chief says there is "full EU unity" in support of Jerusalem becoming the capital of both Israel and a future Palestinian state.

Federica Mogherini said the bloc's member states would not recognise the city as Israel's capital before a final status peace agreement.

She spoke after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants the EU to follow the US in doing so.

President Donald Trump's move prompted widespread international criticism.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Uppala Chandraesekera had just arrived in Canada as a refugee from Sri Lanka when she got her first taste of racism in this country. It was decades ago, when she was just a kid.

"I must have been a little over eight, and two teenagers in a car drove by and called me a 'Paki,'' she says.

After Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in September, recovery and clean-up workers discovered that vandals had smeared red paint over a historical marker at the one-time location of Camp Logan, recently rededicated to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Houston “riot” of 1917.

The paint covered the segment of the inscription that explained the history of the Third Battalion of the 24th United States Infantry, a predominantly black unit assigned to guard the camp during its construction shortly after the United States entered World War I.

WASHINGTON ― Saudi Arabia in free fall would make the other crises in the Middle East look puny.

The hugely wealthy kingdom is key to U.S. efforts to combat America’s most urgent threats. It has stockpiled thousands of ready-to-launch missiles, tens of thousands of bombs, uncounted reserves of small arms, hundreds of tanks and fighter jets and some of the most aggressive spyware available in the world.

A former Mesa, Arizona police officer who fatally shot and killed an unarmed father of two was cleared of second degree murder charges on Thursday.

Philip Mitchell Brailsford, 27, was also cleared of criminal liability in the death of Daniel Shaver. It took the Maricopa County jury approximately 12 hours over a span of two days to find Brailsford not guilty.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — The camp was supposed to be a refuge. Falmata’s life had been stolen by war ever since the sixth grade, when she was abducted from her home and raped repeatedly by Boko Haram’s fighters for the next three years.

She finally escaped last spring, slipping into the bush while her captors slept. Fourteen years old and alone, she made it to a camp for victims of the war, and had just settled in for the night when she heard footsteps outside her tent. A security officer’s voice instructed her to come out. Frightened, she obeyed.

When black-clad marchers began smashing windows in Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day, the city’s police force — reputedly the best in the country at upholding protesters’ rights during disruptive demonstrations — went nuclear.

Officers quickly deployed pepper spray, tear gas, and crowd-control grenades of various types. The Metropolitan Police Department opted to “kettle” everyone on the streets nearby the initial anarchist-driven property destruction, something it does not, by reputation, make a habit of doing during protests.

Mayors tend to occupy a permanent part of New York City’s physical, or mental, landscape. There’s an airport named after Fiorello La Guardia, while New York University has a graduate school that memorializes Robert Wagner. The East River crossing at 59th Street is now the Ed Koch Bridge and the hub of the city bureaucracy has been renamed the David Dinkins Municipal Building. Rudy Giuliani, Abe Beame, and John Lindsay may not have eponymous physical monuments—yet—but their names, for better or worse, define eras.

The UK's most senior military officer has warned of a new threat posed by Russia to communications and internet cables that run under the sea.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, the chief of the defence staff, said Britain and Nato needed to prioritise protecting the lines of communication.

Three hundred and twenty miles north of the Arctic Circle, a weather station in America’s northernmost city of Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, has been quietly collecting temperature data since the 1920s.

Early this month, while preparing a report on US climate, experts at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) noticed something odd: They were missing data from Utqiaġvik for all of 2017, and some of 2016.

Uber allegedly engaged in a range of “unethical and unlawful intelligence collections”, including the theft of competitive trade secrets, bribery of foreign officials and spying on competitors and politicians, according to an explosive legal document published on Friday.

It’s the latest chapter in the discovery process for the company’s messy legal squabble with Waymo, Google’s driverless car spin-off, which has accused Uber of stealing trade secrets.

The details were outlined in a 37-page demand letter filed by the ex-Uber security manager Richard Jacobs, who left the company earlier this year. The document paints a picture of a team of employees dedicated to spying on rivals and “impeding” legal investigations into the company.

Abu Fahed, a Syrian rebel and resident of the district of Eastern Ghouta, was on his way home from work a few weeks ago when he lost five members of his family. He had been building hillforts in Jobar, part of the effort to keep Eastern Ghouta, a hotly contested area on the outskirts of Damascus, in rebel hands. He stopped in at his sister’s home on his way back to the town of Kafr Batna, where he lives.

As we wait to hear more about the tax cuts coming in B.C. Budget 2017, it is important to remember what has happened to our provincial tax system over the past 16 years.

Significant tax cuts to personal income taxes between 2001 and 2008, combined with increases to regressive taxes like MSP premiums have reshaped our tax system to favour the top one per cent of households at the expense of middle- and modest-income British Columbians.

Anita Hill, who sparked a nascent national reckoning with sexual harassment when she testified during Clarence Thomas’s supreme court confirmation hearings in 1991, has been chosen to lead a commission on sexual misconduct organized and financed by some of the most prominent figures in Hollywood.

The Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace will be charged with tackling “the broad culture of abuse and power disparity” in media and entertainment, a statement from its organisers said.

A senior member of Nigel Farage’s parliamentary group staff in Brussels was known for making trips to the Russian embassy in Belgium and was accused of orchestrating a smear campaign against a critic of the Kremlin, the Guardian has been told.

Two former staffers who worked for Farage’s Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group (EFDD) and who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity said a senior member of the group’s staff, a native of Malta named Kevin Ellul Bonici, was known to have a relationship with the Russian embassy.

“White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudiments of their freedom through the killing of whites.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power

In the quote above, Coates is referring to the bloodiest war in US history, the Civil War, a war begun by Confederate traitors willing to blow up the whole house in defense of a single freedom: their assumed right to own other human beings.

WASHINGTON — Over the past year, Republicans have made their priorities clear. Their effort to repeal Obamacare would have left tens of millions of people without health insurance. Now Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, wants to ram through an enormous tax giveaway to the wealthy before seating Doug Jones, Alabama’s newly elected Democratic senator.

The Republican agenda on health care and taxes may be popular with wealthy campaign donors, but it is widely disliked by the American people. It’s no wonder why. Despite a booming stock market and record corporate profits, workers in this country are being squeezed by flat wages, soaring household expenses and declining savings. They want Washington to start working for them and to spend tax dollars investing in our future — not bankrupting it.

When Janet Yellen leaves her role as the chair of the Fed at the end of her term in February, she will have a pretty impressive record to tout. She has led the Fed during one of the longest market rallies in modern history and presided over one of the biggest declines in unemployment and most significant periods of job creation ever. Despite these successes, critics had hoped that Yellen, who inherited an economy that had stabilized since the recession, would be aggressive in rolling back recession-era policy. Instead she proceeded with a slow and cautious approach to raising interest rates in the face of a strengthening economy.

Brexit is set to cause a loss of UK influence on a par with the 1970s, requiring a national assessment of how the UK’s future standing can be recovered once Brexit is complete, Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, has warned.

Speaking to the foreign affairs select committee, Sawers said: “We can see the trend of the coming years and we do not want to go through a repeat of the 1970s where the UK went progressively downhill compared to our national partners. We will need to turn it around. I am not sure how we are going to do it.”

CHICAGO — The jobs were the best they would ever have: collecting union wages while working at Ford, one of America’s most storied companies. But inside two Chicago plants, the women found menace.

Bosses and fellow laborers treated them as property or prey. Men crudely commented on their breasts and buttocks; graffiti of penises was carved into tables, spray-painted onto floors and scribbled onto walls. They groped women, pressed against them, simulated sex acts or masturbated in front of them. Supervisors traded better assignments for sex and punished those who refused.

Democracy gone Astray